The main thing that sold me on Signalis was the presentation and beyond some occasionally pretentious moments ("this space intentionally left blank" cmon now) it does really hold up.
Signalis' core gameplay loop revolves around getting key items to unlock rooms with yet more key items to unlock even more rooms etc. and while that does get somewhat stale, the bigger issue is the honestly pointless 5 item inventory restriction which doesn't accomplish anything other than getting you to run back to the save-room and dump some key items/ammo to make space for more items or retrieve key items when you need them. There's no strategic inventory management or anything, it's just kinda annoying. The exploration is also pretty bland, there's no real secrets or anything else to find and a lot of the areas look very samey.
The puzzles, however, are super creative and were probably the highlight of the game.
The combat is not very fun either, it's really simplistic in terms of interactions and the enemy AI feels kinda crappy/inconsistent in regards to player detection and path finding. Another issue is that when you re-enter a room, an enemy can be right on top of the door you just entered through making you take unavoidable damage.
Towards the end of the game, as rooms started to have higher enemy density, I bumped the difficulty down so I could just sprint through because it was getting downright tedious to play.
Regarding the story, Signalis' opening hours set up this really cool mysterious universe but the mysteries are never really expanded upon and so much of the narrative is "left open to interpretation" that even at the end of the game, barely anything is known about anyone, anything or what is actually happening. The game tries to go for some emotional trauma character driven story but that doesn't really work out when you don't know anything about the characters or what they're even trying to do.
Signalis ends up being a superficial survival horror game with some cool visuals that's lackluster in every other aspect.
Signalis' core gameplay loop revolves around getting key items to unlock rooms with yet more key items to unlock even more rooms etc. and while that does get somewhat stale, the bigger issue is the honestly pointless 5 item inventory restriction which doesn't accomplish anything other than getting you to run back to the save-room and dump some key items/ammo to make space for more items or retrieve key items when you need them. There's no strategic inventory management or anything, it's just kinda annoying. The exploration is also pretty bland, there's no real secrets or anything else to find and a lot of the areas look very samey.
The puzzles, however, are super creative and were probably the highlight of the game.
The combat is not very fun either, it's really simplistic in terms of interactions and the enemy AI feels kinda crappy/inconsistent in regards to player detection and path finding. Another issue is that when you re-enter a room, an enemy can be right on top of the door you just entered through making you take unavoidable damage.
Towards the end of the game, as rooms started to have higher enemy density, I bumped the difficulty down so I could just sprint through because it was getting downright tedious to play.
Regarding the story, Signalis' opening hours set up this really cool mysterious universe but the mysteries are never really expanded upon and so much of the narrative is "left open to interpretation" that even at the end of the game, barely anything is known about anyone, anything or what is actually happening. The game tries to go for some emotional trauma character driven story but that doesn't really work out when you don't know anything about the characters or what they're even trying to do.
Signalis ends up being a superficial survival horror game with some cool visuals that's lackluster in every other aspect.